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November 28 - December 22, 2020
The British may have given India parliamentarism of a certain kind but the democratic spirit was alive long before colonisation.
Hence, Nehruvian secularism is like the erstwhile Ottoman system where different communities had their own laws and ghettos, even though the Ottoman State was explicitly Islamic. But when it comes to economic redistribution and the welfare state, the ghettos disappear for the Nehruvian worldview and we all become Indians once again, rather conveniently.
Those who complain selectively about fake news, social media and WhatsApp forwards are more often than not complaining about the loss of their monopoly in setting the narrative as they can no longer decide what should be discussed.
India is not just a nation-state manufactured in 1947, it is an ancient civilisation with a remarkable—and unique—cultural continuity across space and time.
This is something that Nehru, Ambedkar and Gandhi understood, even if modern-day Nehruvians, Ambedkarites and Gandhians do not. India is an ancient, continuing civilisation that is slowly being transformed into a nation through the agency of a modern state.
The most troubling thing about that is not the ‘idea’ part, where we can partially agree and partially disagree, but the ‘the’ part.
What the elite successfully hide is their own distaste for new ideas and for a new kind of governance, for such a change would undermine their influence and disturb the established privileges.
On almost every conceivable front, be it economic policy, foreign policy or internal security, India’s deracinated and comfortably cocooned intellectual elite are unable to offer new ideas. They endorse or criticise an idea not based on whether it might work, but where it came from. Rather than their political positions being informed by a philosophical worldview, their philosophical pronouncements derive from predetermined political positions. Some of the most eminent intellectuals write with pompous verbosity, as if showboating only to sound intelligent, and indulge in rhetorical games that
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The Hindutva movement may want a future without caste so that it can better mobilise Indic faiths. It desires an end to all religion-based personal laws, some of which are blatantly misogynist. It does not want to go back to a past where homosexuality was criminalised. It is okay with the right of women to choose when it comes to all abortions, except the very late-term ones, and so on.
Indians are of course quarrelling, and no one can prophesy when they will stop quarrelling. But granting the fact, what does it establish? Only that Indians are a quarrelsome people. It does not destroy the fact that India is a single geographical unit. Her unity is as ancient as Nature. Within this geographic unit and covering the whole of it there has been a cultural unity from time immemorial. This cultural unity has defied political and racial divisions.
Even today, there are some who claim that India was created in 1947 or 1950, confusing the establishment of a constitutional democratic republic with the genesis of India.
As Nassim Taleb has observed, ‘religions are not quite religions: some are philosophies, others are legal systems.’17
unlike the Right elsewhere, is potentially more at home with liberalism–secularism than the Left could ever be.
It should be remembered that the RSS or its allied organisations do not wield any theology-based influence on what Hindus should think about homosexuality or other issues, whereas the Christian and Muslim organisations that supported keeping Section 377 and opposed the Court’s decision have substantial sway over what their adherents should see as right or wrong. This is a structural difference between the decentralised, polytheistic Hindu way and the Abrahamic, monotheistic faiths.
Any government that creates minority religion-based schemes and reservations—it would be baffling to any rational, neutral observer how these are termed ‘secular’—is incentivising conversions from the majority community, especially if such reservations bestow socio-economic and not just political benefits.
The demand for separate electorates prior to independence and the Partition of India itself arose from the view that Muslims were a separate group. In a free, democratic India, if Muslims are to be treated as a group and not as individual Indian citizens, why then did we accept the trauma of Partition?
Swarajya magazine’s Swati Goel Sharma has comprehensively documented the deep bias in media reporting on hate crimes and alleged lynchings of minority groups. Sharma identified three aspects of such bias—first, the reliance on English language news reports to construct narratives and databases; second, the disporportionate focus on minority victims of Hindu violence while often ignoring Hindu victims of minority violence; third, the dishonesty of categorising motives based on the already flawed selection.66
While premier schools and educational institutions funded by public money have large religious quotas, the generous public subsidies as well as the protection afforded by government regulation certainly helped them achieve their premier position. This then becomes incentive for Hindus to convert, since becoming a Christian increases one’s chances of getting admission to some of India’s top schools and colleges. The obvious implication is also that India has a system of government-funded Christian evangelism. Is that secular?
It exempts elite minority schools from the Right to Education Act while forcing even low-cost private schools run by the majority community to be burdened, even to the extent of closing down, by the pernicious legislation’s financial liabilities.
A number of state governments have legislated their way onto the governing boards of major temples in which corrupt, inefficient and even non-Hindu government nominees sit as members, much to the chagrin of devotees, directing the day-to-day affairs of sacred Hindu sites. However, in the governance of churches, mosques or gurdwaras, community members have the final say.
For example, if one religious group is not allowed to adopt children but others are, then the State is effectively giving them a rather unpleasant choice—accept our definition of your faith, or declare yourself an apostate.
Ayn Rand was right when she said, ‘The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.’
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.83
Successive Indian governments did little to change regressive gender practices in the Muslim community under the garb of protecting them. The result is that Muslim women today are far less likely to be a part of the economic mainstream of the country. It is not that they do not have aspirations—the sad reality is those aspirations were sacrificed at the altar of electoral politics and political convenience by successive pseudo-secular governments, almost all of them led by the Congress party.
law, a Hindu cannot be a member of the NCMEI. While non-Hindu Supreme Court judges or a local district collector can be trusted to judge knotty theological issues pertaining to Hinduism and the government has the power to appoint non-Hindus as trustees of Hindu temple trusts, it considers it fit to explicitly exclude Hindus from a statutory public body such as NCMEI.
Not only do Indian governments not shy away from taking temple money for public schemes, they pool such funds with taxpayer money and create subsidies for Christians to travel to Bethlehem, as the Congress party chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR) had done in Andhra Pradesh.46
The concept of Secularism as known to the modern West is dreaded, derided and denounced in the strongest terms by the foundational doctrines of Christianity and Islam … It is, therefore, intriguing that the most fanatical and fundamentalist adherents of Christianity and Islam in India—Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs—cry themselves hoarse in defence of Indian Secularism.100
The difference is that while the BJP-led Union government is attempting to bring minorities into the mainstream through modernising instruction and formalising institutions,109 certain ‘secular’ governments seem more interested in continuing with the orthodox mode of religious instruction.
History tells us that the day the BJP starts treating members of the majority and minority communities as equal citizens before the law, all we will witness is organised scaremongering that the minorities are under threat. It is not without reason that the faithful are exhorted by their religious clergy to vote against the BJP.
While temples suffer from maladministration by the government and fritter away what should be their due income, Christian religious institutions raise funds from abroad and build schools and hospitals, with such educational and health institutions often enjoying liberalised regulations, giving them a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
At a rigorous and non-colloquial level, rationality has to be but tautological. This is so because to deem a practice as irrational implicitly accepts a standard of rationality, and attributes anything else to a certain form of ‘false consciousness’.
In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product.125
Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as ‘rationality’ of a belief, there is rationality of action.
Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is deemed irrational.’129
Taken further, religion serves the purpose of preventing a person from thinking he is a God. Superstition kills solipsism.
The criminalisation of the Aghori identity is lamentable, for the existence of sects like the Aghoris captures the deepest strains of liberalism in the Hindu faith—their way of life pushes the boundaries of what is considered morally acceptable by mainstream society.
India’s Constitution doles out ‘rights’ to individuals. The American Constitution assumes pre-existing rights and freedoms, and places limitations on the government instead.
The State should exist merely as a guarantor–protector of rights that individuals inalienably have.
Singh claimed while campaigning during the 1999 general elections that the 1984 pogrom had been orchestrated by the RSS and that the Congress party had nothing to do with it.159 He made this wild assertion because no investigation till then had been able to pin down the Congress party or any of its leaders for perpetrating the 1984 pogrom, even though there were eyewitness accounts of prominent Congress party functionaries leading mobs to kill innocent Sikhs. The Misra Commission constituted in May 1985 kept the names of the accused secret from the public. More committees and commissions were
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Contrast the farce that the investigations into the 1983 Nellie riots and the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom were reduced to, with the thorough investigation that Narendra Modi faced in the cases pertaining to the 2002 Gujarat riots. Not only did the Special Investigation Team (SIT) constituted by the Supreme Court fully exonerate Modi, the 541-page SIT closure report recorded that ‘Modi was busy with steps to control the situation, establishment of relief camps for riot victims and also with efforts to restore peace and normalcy’, completely contradicting the false narrative manufactured by denizens
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The charge of not being inclusive is also inaccurate. The word ‘inclusive’ has become a euphemism to justify
irresponsible and wasteful government spending, usually based upon identity, and is parroted by all those who promote the type of socialism that kept India impoverished for decades. In India, one is branded communal if one doesn’t support State welfare of citizens based on religious criteria.
This is a hideous perversion of...
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The rights-based development paradigm fundamentally misunderstands the reasons behind India’s poverty, and it points away from the direction that governance in India needs to take so that many more Indians can become wealthy and prosperous.
The rapid growth of mobile telephony in India ranks inarguably as one of India’s greatest success stories. It is important to trace the history of telephony and draw lessons from this success story, for such successes have been rare in Indian business and policy history. It is a case study for how changing the role of government from business owner to regulator can enable an industry to pole vault ahead.
The results speak for themselves—Rajiv Gandhi and Pitroda’s model of promoting growth through DoT trying to meet the demand for telephones failed conclusively, whereas the Vajpayee government’s policies curtailed the State’s role and created space for private entrepreneurs to deliver cheap and reliable telecom service speedily on a massive scale.
The restructuring and recapitalisation helped to transfer wealth from taxpayers to the pockets of a clique of business houses who were close to the Congress party and the Nehru–Gandhi family. Even the media was co-opted successfully, as it celebrated these paper tigers as respectable industrialists.
The Indian government too has for decades faced the challenge of accurately identifying, recording and categorising who its citizens are. This is necessary for multiple facets of governance, especially for designing poverty alleviation programmes and delivering welfare efficiently. The problem is now comprehensively being addressed with the advent of digital technologies in the public sphere and the emergence of new kinds of digital public goods.
India’s GDP per capita (2010 US dollars) crawled at the Nehruvian rate of growth from $330 (1960) to $581 (1990), a compounded growth rate of just 1.9 per cent per year for three decades.
All the Governments—the pre-split Congress, the first Indira Government, the Emergency Government, the Janata Government and today’s second Indira Government—have shut their eyes to the damage which the controls are doing. All they see is the advantage of these controls to the politicians. Hence, in spite of any desire they may feel to eliminate restrictions on the economy and to make progress on the economic front, they neither wish nor dare to reduce any of those controls or restrictions which effectively inhibit business.74
